What’s Legal Isn’t Necessarily Ethical

Harvest Facts: Pounding Perch In many regions, yellow perch rank at the top of the ice angler’s hit list. Their delicacy and generally positive attitude make them popular targets wherever they’re abundant in sizes larger than about 8 inches. Several studies have found that perch are vulnerable to overfishing, however, given easy access to good ice and typically generous bag-limits. Greg Power, biologist with the North Dakota Department of Fish and Game, tells the tale of Froelich Dam, a 160-acre lake south of Mandan during the mid-1990s. “Word got out about good catches of 7- to 11-inch perch,” Power recalls, “and it wasn’t unusual to see over 100 anglers spread across the lake. The early bite was strong, with lots of 10- and 11-inchers, mostly big females. We did a creel survey there and estimated that anglers harvested 14,000 perch between January 1 and the middle of February. That equated to 26 pounds of perch per acre harvested in just 6 weeks. “When the ice went out, we sampled for perch with gill nets and caught few, with big ones rare. Anglers had removed about 60 percent of the perch over 4 inches that winter. The females were particularly hard hit, and we had to restock small perch to sustain the population.” Over the last decade, biologists studied the perch collapse on vast Lake Michigan and found that there, too, overfishing had taken a toll. A key factor in poor spawning success was the harvest of far too many large females, the result of perch popularity and nonexistent bag-limits. States are evaluating new regulations for Lake Michigan, after emergency reductions in bag-limits were enacted over the past five years. The lesson is clear: To ensure continued good perch-fishing, anglers need to moderate their own catches, keeping some fish and releasing most of the largest ones, or stricter regulations will need to be passed to keep larger females in the lake. —Steve Quinn

Three or four skilled catch-and-kill ice anglers fishing this same specific pike spot for a week or two could dramatically and negatively impact in a single season the lake’s longterm trophy-pike potential. Indeed, they could legally harvest numerous trophy-sized pike whose combined age would exceed several hundred years.

It’s happened in the past, in waters as large as Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago. In the late 80s and early 90s, when Winnebago had an abundance of gizzard shad as a result of warm-weather conditions, trophy pike population flourished. When food is abundant during the spring, summer, and fall, pike (and walleye) enter the winter well-fed and, not surprisingly, ice anglers experience only mediocre success when fish have plenty to eat.  

In 1992, the shad base collapsed on Winnebago due to an unusually cool summer. That winter, the pike were hungry and anglers enjoyed outstanding success. Unfortunately, many large, mature, egg-laden females were harvested, and trap nets set the following spring revealed that pike numbers had plummeted as much as 81 percent from previous surveys. More than a decade later, Winnebago is still recovering from that single winter overharvest.

Especially during late winter and early spring, the largest, oldest, and most important members of a fish population (from a recruitment perspective) cram themselves into a small number of highly accessible, shallow, prespawn locations, where they can be extremely vulnerable to angling.

It can be especially problematic for spring spawning species like northern pike, walleye, perch, and crappies, when prime spawning areas are at a premium and major segments of the entire breeding population gather in only one or two spots. The same fish that might have been spread out along miles of shoreline and weedlines during the open-water season are now concentrated in one or two locales measuring just a few hundred square yards.

Ice fishing can also impact large lakes where access and travel are often impeded during the open-water season. Lake Superior is a good example. Even when you can get on the world’s largest water body during the open-water period, anglers tend to stay close to shore and keep a watchful eye on the weather. Superior is no place to be when the wind blows—even gently.

In the winter, though, when significant portions of the lake freeze, ice anglers can travel fairly easily via snowmobile or vehicle to locations as remote as the Apostle Islands. When safe ice exists, winter anglers can catch up to one-quarter of Wisconsin’s lake trout.

A similar scenario plays out on gigantic Green Bay. As many as two million perch are hauled up holes in the ice in the winter, compared to 1.5 million perch caught by anglers fishing during the much longer open-water season. No other season has the potential to host such easy angling access to vulnerable fish.